You are here

Cory Doctorow

Audio Tabs

Music Credit: “My Luck” composed and performed by Broke for Free. Courtesy of free Music Archive

<music up>

Cory Doctorow: Well, I absolutely had a great start with—with science fiction. My dad was a genre reader. You know, he’d been an emigre from the Soviet Union to Canada, and started in on comic books as he was acquiring English proficiency. And so, by the time, you know I rolled around, he was steeped in the lore of Conan and all the rest of it. And my father, it’s funny, he’s an odd duck, he’s a Marxist. And so being a Marxist and a Conan fan, he would remix Conan stories and tell them to me when I was growing up. But, he’d replace Conan with this gender balanced trio called, Harry, Larry, and Mary. And when they would depose the evil vizier, and get rid of the emperor, they wouldn’t install themselves on the throne, they’d create kind of workers dictatorships, you know, agricultural collectives.

<music up>

Jo Reed: That’s science fiction writer, blogger, activist, and journalist, Cory Doctorow. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

Cory Doctorow is somebody who has thought long and hard about what it means to live and create in the age of the internet. He’s been in the frontlines of the debates about copyright and freedom of information. He’s a proponent of Creative Commons—which provides free, easy-to-use copyright licenses that allows the public to share and use creative work, and he’s an opponent of Digital Rights Management or DRM—a technology that restricts the use of purchased content. For example, let’s say you bought an eBook from Amazon but you can't read it on the eBook reader of your choice, that's because of DRM. Cory Doctorow advocates for participatory culture on his tech blog, Boing Boing, and as a consultant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And this alone could be a full-time job, but Doctorow is also an award-winning author who’s written some 24 books over the past 15 years, including novels, graphic novels, short story collections, young adult novels, and children’s books. It’s a career fueled by imagination and passion—as it would have to be considering how immersed Cory Doctorow is in his work. Aside from being impressed by the fluidity of his writing and the scope of his thinking…. I really had to wonder: Does the man ever sleep?

Cory Doctorow: Ha. You know, to be honest, the thing that causes me to lose sleep is not getting up early to work, it’s a combination of this other thing I do which is writing the web. So I’ve been one of the co-owners of—of one of the original weblogs, Boing Boing for more than 15 years now. And every day I write, sort of, 5 to 20 things about what’s going on in the world. As a way of keeping track of it for my own benefit, and then having part of this shared distributed discussion that—that the web has been so amazing at for all of this time.

Jo Reed: Do you find that writing sharpens your thinking?

Cory Doctorow: It’s an interesting question. I think writing nonfiction definitely makes me think through my ideas more thoroughly. I think one of the great advantages to blogging is that when you write a note not to yourself, but to an unknown stranger, there’s a certain rigor you have to approach it with. It has to be comprehensible to someone who doesn’t have the background and who isn’t inside your own head. And getting there makes you think it through. And a certain amount of retreading that happens because if you’re following a news story, and then you’re writing posts about its twists and turns as they emerge, then you have to be able to reiterate the idea over and over again to try and summarize it in ever neater packages until you can maybe boil it down to a sentence or two. And so that really gives you a lot of clarity on not just why something is significant, but how to convey that significance to other people, just I think a very important skill in persuasive writing, and, you know, they always say that the way to get better at something is to do a lot of it. And doing a lot of it is unequivocally a great honer of argument. And then, in terms of fiction writing, you know, I’m more of a pantser than a planner. I don’t tend to plot very thoroughly. I have some rules of thumb for how plots should work. I think plots usually involve people who are trying intelligently to solve problems intelligently, so that we’ll sympathize them, who fail to solve those problems, and have the problems get worse through no fault of their own, which gives us a new problem for them to solve that’s more urgent. And over time, if you just keep repeating that, you get to a climax, or you get to a point where the stakes can’t be raised any higher. And writing without knowing exactly where you’re going, but having a rule of thumb that you’re going to follow to get there, means that you—instead of finding clarity, it’s more of like a voyage of discovery, you know, as clichéd—or hackneyed as that sounds. And so, that’s not so much about clarifying my thoughts, as just discovering them.

Jo Reed: That’s a good distinction. And it’s a good distinction as a reader too, between reading fiction and non-fiction. Cory, tell me your own origin story as an artist, as a writer.

Cory Doctorow: Well, I started writing science fiction stories when I was a kid and Toronto was an amazing science fiction city to grow up in—partly because of this woman, Judith Merril, who was an American science fiction fan, and critic, and writer, and editor, who left the US to raise her kids in Canada, and brought her book collection along. And she had recently divorced Frederik Pohl, who was another great writer. And she brought the—she got the books and she brought them to Toronto and donated them to the Toronto Public Library System. And she opened a library that was then called the, Spaced Out Library, ‘cause it was the late ‘60’s and is now called the Merril collection because she’s dead and can’t stop them from putting her name on it anymore, and she was the writer in residence there. And so, as a kid, I could go down there with my stories, and she would read them and tell me how to make them better. And even more importantly, she hooked me up with other writers. And so, I ended up in this writing workshop that’s still going called The Cecil Street Irregulars, and that was hugely beneficial to the way that I wrote. And then to add to that, we had a new used science fiction bookstore. It’s the oldest science fiction book store in the world. And it too is still going. It’s called Bakka Books. And when I was a kid, as with today, the people who worked behind the counter, were writers. And so, I went in for the first time when I was nine or ten years old, and this writer named Tanya Huff, who sometimes writes under T. S. Huff, she lead me back to the used book section and found a book for me, H. Beam Piper’s, Little Fuzzy that was on sale for a dollar. I still have it, and I went home and I read it, and I came back for more. And, when Tanya quit, when she quit to write full time, I went to work in the store. And today, still, it is full of science fiction writers who are at the starts of their careers, or even well along. So, between, you know, the store, and the library, and the writers groups, it was really easy for me to fall into the genre.

Jo Reed: You say that with science fiction—with your fiction writing rather, that there’s less planning, it’s a voyage of discovery for you, but you’re writing also involves world building, which in my mind, which is a mind that does not write science fiction, world building would seem like it would need an extraordinary amount of planning.

Cory Doctorow: When I world build, there are some elements that I kind of come into it knowing that I’m going to write. But there’s also lots of like, “Well, I’ve said, A and B, does that imply a C that I can use here?” Like, I brought along these pieces of furniture—what goes with them? And so, it’s not so much built as it is grown, you know, as the circumstances dictate. You know, if a novel should only have the things that it requires and nothing else, then a lot of world building will necessarily be extraneous, but on the other hand, if there are elements of the world external to the characters that highlight or play off of what’s going on with the characters, then bringing them in becomes a very kind of salient thing. And, I think that science fiction, this is a thing that I learned from my editor at Tor, wonderful editor named Patrick Nielsen Hayden, he said that science fiction is sometimes—it’s a little cogwheel in a great big wheel. And the little wheel is the story of the protagonist, and the big wheel is the world. And the little wheel turns the big wheel, and the little wheel goes around and around until the world has made a full revolution. And so the—the life of the character gives you an in the round view of the world in which they live. And you can build the cog teeth of that world, as you go. You don’t need to know what they’re all going to be, you just need to know what the next tooth is. And you can build these, you know, irregular gears. These eccentric gears that mesh together that are dictated by the demands of the story.

Jo Reed: You’re first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, you published it under a Creative Commons license. I want you to tell me your thinking about that.

Cory Doctorow: Sure, well, there’s at least three different things that go into the decision to allow people to freely make use of it. So part of it is the realpolitik, right? This is like 2017, copying’s never going to get harder from here on in. Your grandchildren will sit around the Christmas table in 50 years and marvel at the days when you couldn’t buy six thumb drives for $1 at the CVS that could hold all the music, movies, books, photos and words uttered. And so, against that realpolitik, you have to assume that anyone who decides to buy a book, does so, to some approximation knowing that they could just get it for free if they wanted to. And so, in that world, the strategy for maximizing your revenue is convincing them that the book is a good deal, and that buying it is a good deed. And so I—I don’t have an enormous amount of control over the commercial terms on which the book are sold, although I do have this one ironclad term, which is that my books may never, ever be sold with Digital Rights Management on them. That’s the anti-copying stuff, because I think that just gets in the way of what people legitimately want to do. It undermines the idea that the book is a good deal. But I also want to show them that doing it is a good deed. That I am performing an act of trust in them, and I’m asking them to live up to that trust. And in part, you know, that’s because whether or not I trust them, they can go and get it for free if they want. So it’s about making that moral case

Jo Reed: I’d like you to say more about your opposition to DRM, Digital Rights Management, because it’s always explained as a way of protecting creative work.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. Well, the internet is a lot more than an entertainment system. You know, the internet is the nervous system of the 21st century. And in the name of defending the livelihoods of creators like me, we have instituted and monotonically expanded a regime of surveillance and censorship and control over the internet that has had no appreciable effect on illegal copying, but has weakened the internet’s resilience that now, you know, the king of Thailand can suppress video of his soldiers committing atrocities just by claiming copyright on those videos, and YouTube just takes them down, automatically, without even investigating those claims to see if they pass the giggle test. And that, as an author, I have a lot of problems, but one of the great ones is the worry about free expression, and my ability to be free to speak my mind. And so, I wanted to make sure, and I want to make sure that my books aren’t part of a rubric for ratcheting up those controls over the internet. But then, there’s also the question of, like, looking myself in the mirror, because the reality is that we are things that copy. Like, it is built into our code, and copying is a feature and not a bug, like we have a name for organisms that cannot reproduce, we call them extinct. And I copied as long and as hard as I could through my whole life. The first story I ever wrote was Star Wars. I came home from the movie in 1977 at the age of six, and just wrote Star Wars out, over and over again, like a kid practicing scales on a piano. And for me to have, like, spent every hour god sent when I was 17 years old copying, and to claim that that was a part of a legitimate artistic progress, but to accuse your 17 year old of committing a felony when they do that to my work, is a grotesque act of hypocrisy. And so, CC was a way of putting a flag in the sand. I get to assert that the ancient practice of sharing literature is alive and well in the internet age. And so, that was the kind of totality of my CC thinking there.

Jo Reed: So, using a CC or Creative Commons license, which allows readers to use your work, and you refused to have DRM embedded in your books. That seems as though it could be a heavy lift for a publisher to agree to that. How did you negotiate it?

Cory Doctorow: Well, I really lucked into it in that my publisher is Tor Books. That’s my U.S. publisher. And they’re part of MacMillan, but they’re a very autonomous unit. And MacMillan, to its enduring credit is extremely experimental itself. So they’re happy to have a business unit that—that plays around with things. And so, when I kind of laid out my reasoning for it, they were okay with it. And they said, you know, “Why not, let’s try an experiment. We’re the world’s largest science fiction publisher, eBooks are an almost entirely science fictional phenomenon at that point.” You know, the science fiction readers being technology early adopters easy to see. You know, I used to say science fiction is the only literature people care enough about to steal. And God help us if it was the other way around, right? If no one liked your books well enough to take them. And so, Tor was pretty cool about saying, you know, “If you want to try this experiment, you can.” And then a couple years later going, “Hey, this experiment worked better than we had any right to believe, we’re going DRM free for 100 percent of our books from now on. And we’re going to retain control over our destiny.” They were so happy with how it turned out, and realized that by not allowing the book retailers, Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble and so on, to lock their books up in proprietary wrappers that the retailers controlled, that they retained more control over their audience.

Jo Reed: Okay, so let me be clear, Amazon or whoever is selling this book online controls the DRM, not the publishers? Can you explain that?

Cory Doctorow: Sure, well, and I think of this as a kind of meta-issue, right? Hachette is kind of the opposite of this, they own Little Brown, and Orbit and a bunch of other big publishers. And Hachette, everything they publish has been DRM’d since day one, period. And Hachette was also the first publisher whose deal with Amazon ran out. And they went back to Amazon and said, you know, “We would like more control over the way that our books are retailed.” And Amazon said, “You know, all the books that you’ve given to us to sell are locked up in our wrappers, and the way that the law works—there’s a law called Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 says that only we can take that DRM off. You can’t authorize your customers to remove the DRM from the books we sold them which means that if you leave Amazon, and only sell your books at Barnes and Noble, you can’t give your—your audience a tool to bring their eBooks over into that new platform. They’re stuck with us forever.” And Hachette said, “Oh, no, no, no. People love our books more then they love Amazon. We’re just walking away.” And Amazon said, “Fine, we’re going to lock out Hachette eBooks for a full year.” And so you couldn’t buy J.K. Rowling novels for a year on Amazon. And at the end of it, Hachette caved because Hachette had given control of their business. Legal control over their business to Amazon, by letting Amazon put DRM on it. And, you know, I had this rule of thumb that is like, if someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won’t let you unlock it, that lock is not there for your benefit. So, the publishers, when they started going to Amazon and saying, “How about you sell our books without DRM,” Amazon was super reluctant to do so. They did now. Now you can buy eBooks without DRM, if the publishers let them.

Jo Reed: Okay—so publishers now have more control over whether or not eBooks have DRM embedded in them, but I know DRM is still an issue with audio books. Why the distinction?

Cory Doctorow: Because Amazon competes in the eBook market, and they don’t really compete in the audio book market. They have 90 percent of that market, and they’re the exclusive supplier to iTunes. They own this company called, Audible. So, Audible does amazing production, and amazing audio books, but they will not let publishers or writers decide whether or not there’s DRM. Everything sold through Audible has to have Audible’s DRM on it. And that means everything sold through iTunes, has to have Audible’s DRM on it which is why you won’t find any of my audio books on Audible because I’m just not willing to make my customers locked to Audible for the rest of time, right? For the rest of the duration of copyright. Audible by dent of locking all of the audio book publishers to their platform, have created a system where if you jump ship to any of the other retailers, your audience has to maintain two separate incompatible audio book libraries. Even on two different sets of devices depending on which kinds of devices they have. And people don’t want to do that. And you know who really doesn’t want to do that? The 20 percent of customers who account for 80 percent of the business.

Jo Reed: I’d like to broaden this question out: As you say, the internet is like our nervous system—artists have to engage with it—but artists also have to survive, and that can be difficult if your work can be grabbed by other people?

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, so I think we should start with a kind of baseline of what reality the internet is replacing. So there’s a thing economists call, survivor bias. So we only ever hear the stories of people who were doing well, not the people who did so poorly that they gave up, right? That’s kind of like by definition. So if you ask like, “Who did the old music industry benefit?” Well, 100 percent of the people that the old music industry benefited were the kinds of people who benefited from the old music industry. Sounds like a tautology, but think about it in the context of like the advent of recorded music. So before recorded music, all of the people who had careers as musicians, give or take, were people who showed up on stages and played. And that meant that a career in music was a career in performance. And when recorded music came along, the people who performed on stage said, “I’m like a live performer. I do something as—as old, and as holy, as the first story told in front of the first fire. You have no business telling me that my rightful place is in a studio taken away from my audience who you will now control access to, so that I can record something once that you can charge for forever. Don’t tell me how to run my business.” And, you know, 75, 80 years later at the advent of Napster, all the people who put those people out of business, turned around and said, “What do you mean in the 21st century, recordings can no longer be a source of revenue. And the only way to make money is to perform live. I’m not a trained monkey. I go in doors with my muse and when I’m done, I show it to the rest of the world, by means of some bourgeois man of commerce. And you have no right telling me I should go out there and caper on stage for drooling idiots.” And they were both right, but they were both wrong, right? The important thing here is that there were musicians who benefited from one technological regime and there were musicians who benefited from the other technological regime. In both cases, they were a tiny minority of all the people who ever wanted a career in music, right? Clearly, like, you know, “don’t quit your day job” isn’t just a mean thing to say, it’s damn good advice. And so here we are in a new technological era. And there are some musicians who’ve done very, very well by it. And there’s a vast number of musicians who’ve done very, very poorly by it. Notably, a lot of the musicians who did very, very well by the old regime, did very, very poorly in the new regime. And so, this discontinuity in who makes a living and how, you know, living in that moment, plus survivor bias, makes us feel like all the artists who used to earn a living have stopped earning a living, and none of the artists who do earn a living do anything that we even recognize as artistic. And the reality is that if you look around, there’s writers earning a living, and there’s musicians earning a living, and there’s people who work on stage, and so on who are earning a living. And the majority of them don’t earn a full time living, or a good full time living from it. And again, I would stipulate that that’s not vastly different from the artistic landscape historically, that—that having a day job has been the norm. And so the answer is, how—how do we reliably give all the people who—or even all the talented people who want to earn a living, a career in the arts, we fund the NEA, right? That’s how we—like without meaning to pander here, that’s how we do it, right? Because markets have never accomplished that. Now, I grew up in Canada, which has a robust arts funding regime. I spent the last 13 years in the UK, which likewise had until austerity, a very robust arts funding regime. And there are a ton of artists who earn a pretty damn good living, not a crazy living, but a good living making art, in non-market ways, that nevertheless are good for the country, good for its soul, good for its identity, good for its culture, and that is the—the only reliable way we’ve ever found. And it has warts and it has problems. It is still the only reliable way we have to actually take a talented person and get them paid. And everything else is a lottery. And I say that as a lottery winner. I have a good middle class, low six figure living as an artist. And the way that I got that is by being unbelievably, spectacularly lucky. I am a good writer with a really solid work ethic, and people with better work ethics than me, who write better than I do, weren’t in the right place, at the right time. Did not get lucky the way I did, and it is a damn shame. And anyone who claims that they got there through merit alone and not luck, is kidding themselves and kidding you.

Jo Reed: It’s funny because just before you started saying that, I had scratched onto my paper, “luck,” and underlined it five times.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah.

Jo Reed: Because, of course talent has a lot to do with it. And of course, hard work has a lot to do with it. But, I completely agree with you, to discount the place of luck, you’re right, you’re kidding yourself.

Cory Doctorow: And starting with the luck of being born middle class, white—

Jo Reed: Oh, yeah. It goes back.

Cory Doctorow: —with parents who support me and all of the rest of that. You know, those were all luck too, right? I got lots of luck that brought me to where I am today. I went to these great publically funded alternative schools, so, you know, the way I became a reader, you asked me about becoming a writer, the way I became a reader was actually the same year I started writing when I was—when I was seven in grade two. I went into my grade two classroom and, you know, we were like taking our shoes off and putting them in our cubbies, and there was book case by the cubbies, and there was a copy of Alice in Wonderland. And I took it off the shelf on a whim, and I opened it up and I started reading it, and I sat down by the cubbies, and the teacher, saw me reading, and just got the hell out of my way, like just left me there. I spent the whole day and the whole next day and I read Alice in Wonderland cover to cover. And I swear it is not a coincidence that today I’m married to a woman named Alice, because that book profoundly changed my life. I benefited in so many ways. ‘Cause honestly, you know, the next day I could have gone and done something else if the teacher had gotten in the way of my reading, and I could have been a totally different person. And, so, yeah, boy did I ever get lucky.

Jo Reed: I’d like to come ‘round full circle and return to science fiction because you have a book that’s just come out called Walk Away, which you call an optimistic disaster novel.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the thing that separates a disaster from a catastrophe, is what we do after the disaster strikes. It’s your resilience, it’s what, you know, investors call your liquidation preference. What happens when you wind things up? That really qualifies a society as a Utopia or Dystopia that is optimistic or pessimistic about the human condition. And so, Walk Away’s a novel in which the one percent just no longer need most of us. And in which, most of us have become just sidelines, surplus to requirements. And this creates a kind of system of privation and police state controls that gets worse and worse. And so, the people who are living through that, through an environmental catastrophe, through creeping authoritarianism, they walk away because one of the things that a high degree of automation has created is tons of brownfield sites littered with tons of exhaust, waste stream from the postindustrial society. And they walk away, and they use stolen software and scavenged materials to build fully automated luxury communism, right? They build these like fantastic spas that anyone can come in and either be, you know, someone who helped maintain the spa or someone who uses the spa, or both, or neither, or who takes the spa apart ‘cause they’re all run like wickies and build something else. And if someone comes along and says, “Hey, that’s our patch of brownfield, and that’s our toxic waste, what are you doing turning it into a luxury spa?” They just shrug and walk on, they walk away, because there’s no shortage of this stuff. There’s the one thing that will never be scarce is the things that other people have thrown away. And, all of this is ticking along until a group of scientists go walk away, because they’ve been working on practical immortality for the one percent. And they realize that they’re about to be complicit in the speciation of humanity to create these immortal, infinitely prolonged super rich, against whom the rest of us would be as mayflies. And so, instead they steal the secret of eternal life and they bring it to the rest of us.

Jo Reed: Hence the optimism.

Cory Doctorow: Hence the optimism. Well, the optimism is about the people getting along with it. Being kind to each other.

Jo Reed: Exactly, coming together and—

Cory Doctorow: —in extremis.

Jo Reed: —building.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah. You know, the theory is that people who don’t treat everyone else as though they’re selfish bastards who will knife them in their sleep, get to live a better life, as opposed to just being knifed in their sleep for their naiveté. And, you know, which one of those things happens depends an awful lot on what we believe will happen. These are self-fulfilling prophecies.

Jo Reed: Absolutely. And I think there’s a good place to rest. Cory, thank you. Thank you so much.

Cory Doctorow: Well, thank you very much. No, my pleasure.

Jo Reed: I really look forward to reading the book.

Cory Doctorow: Well, I really hope you enjoy it.

Jo Reed: I do too.

That’s author and activist, Cory Doctorow. His latest novel is called Walk Away. You can also find his writing on the technology blog, Boing Boing. You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.